The seminar introduces students to major themes of frontier and western history by exploring some of the field's most interesting recent scholarship. It is not a systematic chronological survey, and those students desiring such a survey may wish to sit in on my western history lecture course at some time. The seminar is reading-intensive--often with well over 300 pages of reading per week--so keeping up with assignments and participating in class discussions is an essential requirement. You should think of the reading you'll do for this course as being akin to the volume and kind of work you'd be likely to do for a prelim field in western history, which means that you should regard this syllabus as an opportunity to develop your ability to move fairly rapidly through a large volume of material, extracting major themes and arguments and controversies without getting bogged down in details. We will not be able to discuss in class everything we read, but it's all important background for your understanding of the field, and I hope you'll read it accordingly.

Although we'll touch on many subjects that have been important to western historians, the seminar has another ongoing agenda that will structure much of our activity. Western history has long been among the most popular fields for teaching history to undergraduates; unlike many other kinds of history, the West evokes very lively interest college classrooms, making it an ideal subject for introducing students to a wide range of historical subjects. We will spend a lot of time in class talking about effective strategies for teaching western history, and we will try to make our discussions broadly applicable to all aspects of undergraduate education pertaining to the past. I have designed this syllabus to include a large and diverse array of readings--more than may be typical in many graduate seminars--that are suggestive not just for their research and their analytical approaches, but for their rhetoric, their literary presentations, and their pedagogical possibilities. I have completely redesigned writing assignments so that each addresses some aspect of the undergraduate classroom: syllabus design, exams, written assignments, class discussions, field trips, and so on. I expect seminar members to put in a lot of time reading, thinking about writing and teaching, and talking about key issues in this field; to compensate for the heavy reading load, I've eliminated all research components from the course.

Handouts:

Syllabus - pdf html